


The Comedy (Is That It's Serious)

by piratekelly



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Cancer, Established Relationship, Happy Ending, Humor, Illness, M/M, Mild Angst, discussion of treatment (but not in-depth), plenty of humor to offset the angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-19
Updated: 2014-07-19
Packaged: 2018-02-09 14:24:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1986312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piratekelly/pseuds/piratekelly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They say that lightning never strikes in the same place twice.</p><p>Unfortunately, not all things work that way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Comedy (Is That It's Serious)

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this last summer before 3A aired, so anything we've learned about the Stilinski family was not brought into the story. There are passing mentions to everything that happened in Season 3 but nothing in-depth. A good portion of this story is based on my experience as my mom battled cancer last year, and it's what helped me deal with it. As this deals with cancer, please read at your own discretion. There's very little medical terminology used, and this story does not focus itself on the disease. More than anything, it focuses on what it does to the people who love the one who has been diagnosed. As such, a number of these events actually happened in the months where my mom went through treatment. If you have questions about the content, please feel free to send a message on Tumblr (muchfic-manypair).
> 
> P.S. Don't post any of my fic to Goodreads.

It’s a warm June day, the top is down on the Jeep (which is, he marvels, still running, even if it is powered solely by the grace of god) and Stiles is absently tapping his thumb against the steering wheel to some new-age pop song playing on the radio. He doesn’t know what it is, or the name of the artist, and to be honest, doesn’t really care to know. He feels like his dad when he thinks it, but he just doesn’t understand kids these days. What happened to _good_ music, the kind that made you feel something, that had a real message for the people, that inspired you to rage against the status quo, to fight the man who’s always bringing you down, to – 

Stiles has a tendency, when stuck doing the more mundane tasks in his life, to get lost in thought.

Apparently driving over to Scott and Allison’s place is one of those things.

He’s not sure what brings it on; the anniversary of his mother’s death had been two months ago, and her scent was long gone from his dad’s house, and her pictures don’t bring on waves of sadness like they once did. Maybe it’s the fact that this had been her jeep, that he remembers driving down these streets on days like this, the sun high in the sky, his mom singing along to the radio, laughing whenever she missed a lyric. He tries to stay focused on the happy memories but he can’t always stop his mind from wandering when he thinks of her. As he makes a right turn he finds himself caught up in the memory of the day his parents told him about the cancer.

It had been a perfectly normal day.

Stiles snorts to himself at the thought. The thought alone seems ridiculous given everything he’s seen and done in the years since she died, years that have included an abundance of bad news. If there is one thing in this world he knows for sure, it’s that when people recount the details of the worst moments of their lives – their lowest lows, the days where the rug gets pulled out from under them with no warning, where they’re left weightless with nothing and no one around to catch them – they always start with the same tired line.

_It had been a perfectly normal day._

He is still blocks away from his destination when the memories take over.

_The sun is shining through the kitchen window above the sink. He remembers seeing the dust particles floating through the air, the rainbow prisms on the wall from where the sun’s rays reflect off a glass on the counter, the gentle touch of his mother’s hand on his cheek._

There’s nothing else the doctors can do, baby.

_Stiles remembers that Scott had sniffed too much glue in class that day. Stiles noticed all the other kids laughing at his best friend, so Stiles ate some. If they were going to make fun of Scott, they better make fun of Stiles, too. They didn’t do anything alone anymore._

I’m going to take time off work for a little while, Stiles. I, uh, I need to be here for you. For both of you.

_The neighbor’s dog had been barking in the backyard. He could smell dinner on the stove: mac ‘n’ cheese and broccoli, his favorite. His mom always made the best mac ‘n’ cheese. His dad was in his uniform, ready to walk out the door for the night shift because it was Tuesday and he always had the overnight shift on Tuesdays._

_It had been a perfectly normal day._

Every time he remembers that day it occurs to him that his childlike wonder had prevented him from truly comprehending the enormity of his mother’s diagnosis. He hadn’t understood, then, what it meant to have any kind of sickness that wasn’t just a case of the sniffles. In the years that have passed, he’s become much more intimately familiar with the gut-wrenching feeling of impending sadness. He’s come to the conclusion that getting bad news is not unlike falling. (Skydiving might be more accurate, but roll with him here.)

You’re having a great day, right? Up in the clouds where it’s cold and sunny and you’ve never felt more alive, blood pumping in your veins because you’re about to do something spectacularly dangerous, and nothing could possibly go wrong, right? But then someone tells you to jump before you’re ready. 

The second your feet break contact with the floor of the plane, you know that something isn’t quite right. It’s the realization that something you’re experiencing is out of the norm. You’re not supposed to be here in the clouds, it’s not natural – you’re supposed to have two feet planted firmly on the ground, not up in the sky with a sense of foreboding sitting heavy in your gut. Humans were never designed to fly. 

You see something out of the corner of your eye. It’s the person on this ride with you, another fragile human taking death by the horns just to feel the rush, and they look scared. They’re pulling a string from their parachute and you haven’t even thought to reach for yours. It’s quiet in the clouds, surrounded by an endless blue sky, a chill biting at your skin; you don’t have to think up here. You didn’t know there was anything to think about, and maybe that was the problem: you didn’t think before you did this. Maybe if you had considered the possibility that there was, in fact, a margin for error, you wouldn’t be careening towards the ground with nothing to stop you. 

It’s a lot colder than it was before. The adrenaline rush is wearing thinner and thinner by the second, evolving into the cold chill creeping down your spine, and the thought occurs to you that maybe, maybe you deserve what’s happening to you. 

You blink and all you can see are all-too-large patterns of greens and browns, a patchwork quilt of solid ground, and you realize you’re falling too fast. You reach for the string, pull as hard as you can because you want to stay here just a little longer, in this place where the only thing that can touch you is the wind, but your parachute fails. You’re falling faster, every second speeding by, and there’s no way to stop yourself. 

Getting bad news is like hitting the ground before you realize you’ve even left the plane.

As he pulls in to Scott’s driveway he thinks to himself:

_It had been a perfectly normal day, until it wasn’t._

\--

Scott and Stiles are on their way to see _The Purge_ (don’t judge – after all they’ve seen in the last seven years, they’re entitled to watch shitty horror movies whenever they want, and the local theater is doing a marathon of epically horrible movies, so yes, they’re going) when Stiles’ phone rings.

“What’s up?”

“Stiles, I know you were planning on heading to Scott’s after the movie, but could you swing by the house first? I want to talk to you about something.”

Stiles frowns. “Got a new case you think might be more my thing?”

“You left your house ten minutes ago, kid. Unless there’s something you’re not telling me, then no, I do not have a new case.”

“Did I forget to put the laundry away? Or the dishes?”

His dad sighs on the other end. “No, and I don’t know why you still do that – you haven’t lived here in over a year. Just… come by after the movie, will you?”

“Uh, sure, Dad.”

“Thanks, kid. See you later.”

He listens to his dad hang up on the other end before throwing his phone in Scott’s lap. It had been an oddly perfunctory call, lacking the usual banter of any of their usual conversations, and it doesn’t sit right with Stiles. Even when his dad is tired, there’s always some sort of life in his voice, but it was almost like he was trying too hard to sound normal. He knows his dad, though, and gives him the benefit of the doubt; if it were something awful, something life and death, if Derek had left town (again, but after the first year Stiles had stopped giving him a hard time for it, especially when he’d come back with no Cora and no alpha powers), then his father would have told him. Outside of the whole “let’s keep the werewolves a secret from dad” period of his life, he and Stiles have always been honest with each other.

So Stiles assumes it’s nothing that can’t wait until after he’s seen a spectacularly bad movie. 

“Everything okay?” Scott asks.

“I think so,” Stiles says. He parks the jeep and hopes Scott’s too focused on other things to hear the uncertainty in his voice. “You ready?” Scott grins as he jumps out of the car and makes a break for the front doors of the theater. “Guess that answers that question,” he mutters, undoing his seatbelt. He’s going to live to regret this.

Two hours later, he’s proven correct. There’s a reason they never saw this when it first came out. It seriously sucked.

He’s done letting Scott pick the movies.

\--

He walks through the front door of his dad’s house half an hour later, the early evening sun shining warm against his back as he steps over the threshold and shuts the door behind him. The house is eerily silent, and it immediately sets Stiles on edge. He checks his phone, sees that it’s not even seven yet, and worry begins to settle in his stomach. He should be able to hear the sounds of his father making himself dinner, something he can pack away quickly because he’s going to be late for the overnight shift tonight if he doesn’t. Stiles keeps his phone out, screen unlocked so he can tell it to call Derek if something’s gone terribly wrong, and he steps into the living room.

“Dad?”

Nothing. He looks around the room for signs of a disturbance, but the ugly blue blanket they’ve had ever since he can remember is still folded and thrown over the back of the couch, the remote is still on the coffee table, and there are no patterns in the carpet to suggest a struggle. The room looks exactly like it had when he’d left for Scott’s that afternoon. He makes his way out to the main hall, turns left and heads toward the kitchen.

It’s a slow walk down that hall, but he can see the glow of the sun coming through the window when the kitchen comes into view, and he leans against the wall the second he sees his father. He’s sitting at the table, a glass of amber liquid in front of him, hunched in on himself like he does when he’s trying not to show that something’s bothering him. Stiles has walked in on him a lot like this, more so when he was a kid than in recent years, back when the Sheriff was still hitting the bottle kind of hard in an effort to dull the pain after Stiles’ mom had passed away. This isn’t a bad night, though – this is the first drink look, and Stiles knows that once he’s done with this glass, his father will sit in that chair for a good ten minutes, debating with himself over whether he needs another.

“What, none for me?”

His dad chuckles, but it’s half-hearted at best. “Absolutely not.” Stiles watches his dad pick up the glass and swirl its contents. He can’t help but think that it looks like liquid honey when the sun hits it just right. “Have a seat.” 

Stiles pockets his phone with shaky hands and reaches for the chair that sits across the table from his dad. He sits down, threading his fingers together and resting them on the worn surface of the wood beneath, and takes in the slump of his father’s shoulders, the way he looks as though the weight of the world rests on him, the way his body screams that he’s tired and completely at a loss. The room is tense, to say the least, like it used to be before he and Derek told his dad about werewolves and hunters, and the atmosphere is familiar and yet foreign all at the same time. The longer his father goes without looking at him, only focusing on the whiskey in his glass with that far-off look in his eye that he gets when bad things have happened, the more Stiles starts to feel like the room is closing in on them. 

“Any chance this is you telling me you’re finally dating Melissa?” He sees the corner of his father’s mouth turn up and Stiles exhales, feels the spark of hope that maybe nothing is wrong, and then he’s just _angry_. “Seriously? You scared the crap out of me just to tell me that? Dad, that is so far from cool it’s in another _galaxy_ , alright? I can’t believe –”

“Stiles, I have cancer.”

The words die a quick death on his tongue, and Stiles is suddenly thankful that he’s already sitting. He feels like he’s been sucker punched, like there’s no oxygen in the room left to help him process anything. He’s not even sure that he’s breathing right now, can’t hear anything over the white noise roaring in his ears because his dad said that _word_ , the one that hasn’t been spoken in this house in fifteen years, the one that’s brought so much pain down on them that they’d sooner forget it exists than speak its name. 

It’s getting harder to maintain any control over his body as his hands blindly scrabble for purchase on the table, his right leg bouncing up and down at a rate that would surprise him if he could focus long enough to think about it. It’s not a panic attack – he’s had enough of those to be able to recognize the signs – because feeling like your entire world just crashed down around you is so much worse.

That word settles under his skin – _cancer_ – and he can feel its ugliness crawling through his veins like molasses, slow and dark like Derek’s arms when he takes away someone’s pain. It’s such an odd thought to have, because one brings death to your door and the other tells him to come back another day, and Stiles wants to laugh at the thought, because how can those two images ignite so many conflicting emotions?

The floodgates open and Stiles is suddenly bombarded with images of his mother in her last few weeks, only it’s not his mom, it’s his dad in that hospital bed. His dad, whose eyes are sunken and surrounded by dark circles, whose lips are chapped and parted around labored inhales and exhales where there were once strong, steady, _full_ breaths. He can hear the staccato beat of the heart monitor as it slows by the day, the endless chattering of hospital staff and family members of patients wandering the hall buried underneath the heady smell of disinfectant and death, and Stiles can’t be here anymore.

He barely registers his dad calling out for him as he pulls his keys out of his pocket and makes a break for the jeep. Had he even shut the front door? He’s acting on autopilot, unlocking and then opening the driver’s side door, climbing in and slamming it closed. He vaguely registers the groan of the ignition as it turns over, the grinding of the gears as he backs out, the squeal of his tires and the tang of burnt rubber in the air as he hits the gas too hard. He’s somewhat aware of the fact that he shouldn’t be driving while he’s so upset, but the fresh air is beginning to bring him back down, if a little slowly, and his body knows where it’s going.

The sun is beginning to set for real now, the blanket of oranges and pinks on the horizon guiding him towards the loft, to Derek, who’ll snark him the rest of the way back to reality and maybe tell him what to do because Stiles has no fucking clue anymore. It was one thing when Stiles was a kid; he knew his mom was sick, but cancer itself was still an abstract thing. He hadn’t known to expect the way the treatment and the disease itself would break down his mother’s body into a shell of who she used to be, the way everything around her dimmed until it was practically muted altogether.

He knows now that there is no way you can prepare yourself to watch someone go through it.

Which is why, by the time Stiles walks through the door to the loft they share now (even after a year the thought still makes his heart flutter, though it does little for him right now), the reality of his situation has rendered him nearly mute.

Derek is near the wall of windows, wearing black sleep pants and a white long sleeved shirt, and Stiles practically runs to him, launching himself into Derek’s broad chest and clinging to him like he’s the only thing that’s real anymore, only releasing the tension in his body after strong arms wrap around his back. Stiles gives a passing thought to shutting the door but the door is the least of his worries at the moment and he’s sure Derek’s really confused right now.

“Stiles?”

He relaxes into the gentle vibration of Derek’s voice under his cheek and exhales heavily. “Can we just… not talk? For now?”

He feels Derek nod against the top of his head. Derek shifts them over to the couch so that he can quickly run over and pull the door shut. Derek turns back to him then, silently padding his way back to the couch before settling down next to Stiles. He notices, as he shifts over to settle himself between Derek’s legs and lean back against his chest, that somewhere along the way he had apparently kicked off his shoes. He doesn’t much care, would have curled up all the same if they were still on, but at least he knows he’s coming back to himself a little bit. 

At some point, Stiles isn’t sure when, he stops thinking about his dad long enough for the steady _thump-thump_ of Derek’s heartbeat to lull him into sleep.

\--

When Stiles wakes up a few hours later, it’s dark outside and he’s alone. Groaning, he pulls the blanket Derek had apparently thrown over him at some point during his nap up over his head, curling in on himself. Maybe if he stays under here long enough, if he never opens his eyes and acknowledges that there’s a world waiting on the other side of that blanket, he can pretend that this is just another night spent at the loft and not a second go-around at the worst day of his life.

But he can hear Derek moving around in the kitchen, obviously doing his best to keep himself as quiet as possible if the hushed swearing that follows yet another slamming cabinet door is any indication. Stiles feels the smile creeping across his face before he can stop it – these are the kinds of moments that made him fall for Derek in the first place, the ones he’s never even shared with Scott, where the man tries to do really nice, thoughtful things that either end in disaster or laughter. This is the Derek Stiles remembers from the summer before the alpha pack, when Derek had been making huge strides to better himself for the pack before it had all fallen apart. This is the Derek that crawled through Stiles’ window at two in the morning a month after graduation, and asked a barely awake Stiles on a date right then and there.

(To say that Derek had been confused when Stiles answered the door in sweats and a ratty Batman t-shirt would be an understatement, but after assuring Stiles that no, Derek asking him out hadn’t been a dream, pizza and making out turned out to be a pretty great first date. Stiles will never admit it, but giving up the alpha power was the best decision Derek’s ever made.)

Things had been great since then. They’ve had the last four years to learn each other in ways they never could have as friends. Stiles had finished college in the spring, started working at the library shortly thereafter, and proceeded to hoard as many books on the supernatural as possible. Derek spends a lot of time with the pack, still guiding Scott through alpha-hood occasionally, but mostly doing some security consulting when he gets bored and the case looks interesting enough. After he’d worked with the Sheriff to make the town safer, word seemed to spread, so Derek gets the occasional call for help. They work well together. Some days test the balance between them more than others, but they’ve made it this far, and that has to count for something.

Though Stiles immediately rethinks their relationship status when Derek turns on the lamp above Stiles’ head and pulls the blanket back. 

“Time to eat.” 

Stiles buries his face in his hands, groaning. “Eloquent as always, Der.” 

“It wasn’t an order, Stiles. We’ve been working on the benefits of inflection, thought I’d try it out.”

“You’re a dick.”

Derek snorts. “You like my dick.” 

“It’s true,” Stiles sighs, dramatically. “I do.” He reaches out and takes the plate from Derek’s hand. A turkey sandwich is better than nothing, he supposes. “I almost can’t believe you said that.”

“You’ve assured me on multiple occasions that your dad has, in fact, not bugged our house. I’m choosing to trust your judgment this time.”

He grins. “He’s not going to have the energy to care, Derek. Kind of got bigger things to worry about right now.”

And just like that, the illusion is broken.

Stiles takes a huge bite of his sandwich in the hope that it’ll make him shut up just for a little while. Derek sighs and sits down next to him, reaching out a hand and resting it on Stiles’ foot. Derek may not be the best with words, even after all this time, but silent support is definitely his strong point.

“He knows you’re here, by the way.” Stiles takes another bite of his sandwich to stop himself from asking exactly what that conversation had involved. “He also told me, in no uncertain terms, that you were not to drive back there tonight and he’d see you in the morning.”

 _Damn_ , Stiles thinks to himself as he takes another bite. _This is a truly delicious sandwich._

Derek sighs, his grip on Stiles’ foot tightening slightly. “We have to talk about it some time, Stiles. That’s what you always tell me, isn’t it? That bottling things up will only make it suck more when you finally let it out?”

Stiles sighs and sets the sandwich and the plate on the arm of the couch. “Isn’t it a violation of some sort of relationship code to use my words against me?”

“I’m not really one for rules.”

It takes a matter of seconds for the silence in the room to grow heavy, but it seems that neither of them know where to start. Judging by the way Derek’s trying to pull him out of denial, it’s pretty obvious that his dad filled Derek in on the situation. But as far as Stiles knows, Derek has never had to deal with the reality of ca¬– of this, and Stiles knows so much more than he wants to for someone who has to watch it happen for a second time. Combined they’re the worst kind of clueless, but Stiles is glad that at least he’s not alone.

“The bite won’t save him, will it?”

Derek sighs. “I don’t think so. Cancer is a result of bad cells in your body multiplying faster than is healthy, right?” Stiles nods. “Well, being a werewolf means everything is accelerated, especially cell reproduction. It’s why we heal so quickly.”

“So what you’re saying is that if he were a born wolf this wouldn’t be an issue, but making him one would just kill him faster.”

“In a nutshell, yeah.”

Stiles frowns. “He already asked, didn’t he?”

“Just to see if it would do any good,” he says, as if Sheriff Stilinski inquiring as to the benefits of becoming a _werewolf_ is completely normal. “Treatment isn’t pretty, no matter how low-grade it is. If there were ways to avoid it and have a guarantee he’d survive, you know he would. No parent should ever –”

Stiles immediately sees red. “If the rest of that phrase is ‘outlive their child’, so help me, Derek, I will punch you.”

“Hey, I –”

He pushes himself up off the couch, knocking the plate and sandwich to the ground. “I’m so sick of people saying that parents are never meant to outlive their kids, like the kids are the only fucking people who matter when death happens. _Every_ person who gets left behind matters, Derek. So where is it in this imaginary rulebook that says it’s okay for kids to watch their parents fade away into a shell of who they used to be, huh? Where’s your justification for that? Because death, in whatever way it happens, just feels really unfair.”

The silence that follows is downright oppressive, even for Stiles. He’s not sure where that outburst came from, at least partially because he didn’t know he felt that way until he’d said it. He knows it’s probably true, having been a witness to nearly every possible combination of ways to die in his short twenty-three years, but why the thought decided to make itself known now is strange. 

Stiles opens his mouth to apologize, but nothing comes out. Instead, Derek grabs Stiles by the wrist and pulls him over as he leans back, so that Stiles is lying chest to chest with him. Stiles lets himself really relax for the first time since he got home from the movies, inhaling the familiar woodsy scent of Derek. He wishes he could stay here, in this bubble they’ve created for themselves, the one where Stiles always has the answers and Derek fights him the whole way just because he can. A lot of things are going to change soon, and fast, and Stiles is glad for at least one constant presence in his life.

“What am I gonna do, Derek?”

“What we always do.”

Stiles frowns. “Wreak havoc?”

“No,” Derek chuckles, gently brushing his lips over Stiles’ forehead. “We’ll figure it out when we have to. Now sleep.”

He stares at the black screen of the TV and thinks to himself that it had been a perfectly normal day.

It’s a long time before he sleeps.

\--

Stiles wakes up the next morning with Derek curled around his back, a heavy arm resting over his hip, and a weight in his chest that no amount of snuggling can lift. He shifts so that he’s facing Derek, so close their noses are nearly touching, and takes comfort in how relaxed Derek looks in sleep. Stiles reaches up and gently brushes Derek’s hair back from his forehead, watches it relax back into place, and reminds himself that this is a man who’s lost literally everything and still managed to find his way back. It hadn’t been without a lot of struggle – Stiles still shudders when he remembers Scott telling him about that night in the boiler room, the night Derek locked himself in with Boyd and Cora fully expecting to die and not caring if he did ¬– but he’s here and he’s happy and he makes _Stiles_ happy, and if anything can give Stiles the strength to get out of bed and talk to his dad, it’s that.

It’s what pushes him out from under the warmth of his werewolf boyfriend and into the waking world. He puts on the jeans he’d been wearing yesterday, spots his socks and shoes in the corner of the bedroom, and decides to leave before Derek can fully wake up. He leans down, brushes his lips against the warm skin of Derek’s cheeks, and slips out of the loft as quietly as possible.

When he walks in the door the first thing he sees is his dad sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper, plates of bacon and eggs and pancakes sitting on the table. It’s still warm, he notices, watching as butter melts and spreads across the top pancake and drips over the edge and onto the plate below. He seems calm, hand steady as he raises his mug full of what Stiles hopes is black coffee sans sugar and cream, and this morning seems so incredibly _normal_ that Stiles hopes for just a second that last night had been a horrible dream and his dad hadn’t been diagnosed with the same thing that killed his mom.

Once again, the reality of the situation catches him off guard, and he’s struggling for breath for the second, third, whatever time in the last 14 hours. Has it really been such a short amount of time? It feels like ages have passed since last night. Is every moment to come going to pass as slowly? Will everything narrow down to this single thought, the voice in his head whispering about the very real possibility of losing his dad?

Also, why the hell does his dad have bacon in the house?

“Stiles?”

He turns to look back at the table. “Huh?”

“You okay, son?”

 _No_ , he wants to say. _What the hell kind of question is that, are you okay? Nothing about this is okay, how are you acting like everything is okay?_

“Because it _is_ going to be okay, Stiles.”

Stiles can feel the heat rising in his cheeks. “So much for an internal monologue.”

His dad chuckles. “Why don’t you sit down? Eat something, settle a bit, and we’ll talk, okay?”

Stiles can’t really do anything but nod, so he lets his dad guide him over to the table, pull out a chair and nudge him into it. Once Stiles feels like he has his bearings he grabs a fork and pulls a few pancakes onto his plate, followed by a few pieces of bacon and a giant spoonful of eggs. After that first bite of warm, buttery pancake, the need to stuff his face hits him full force. Derek had forced him to eat before they’d gone to bed, but Stiles hadn’t had much of an appetite and had only been able to stomach a little bit before insisting he be left to fucking sleep. He tucks in after that, shoveling bite after bite into his mouth, goes back for seconds after he practically inhales his first helping, and eats until he feels sick. He can feel his dad side-eyeing him from across the table, but Stiles is too preoccupied with his perfectly crispy slice of bacon to give it any real consideration.

When he’s sated and a little nauseous, John folds the newspaper as neatly as possible and sets it to his right. Stiles watches him cross his arms against his chest and lean back in his chair, taking in a few steadying breaths before focusing in on Stiles.

“Do you have any questions about what I told you yesterday?”

“You mean you have answers that include the comfort of scientific fact?”

“I would have said so last night, but it’s difficult when the person with all the questions runs out your front door without a second thought.”

Stiles cringes. “Fair point. Sorry about that, by the way.”

John waves him off. “It’s okay, kid. I probably should have softened the blow a little bit.”

“Is there really a way to do that, dad? I mean, it’s… you know.”

“Cancer?” he asks, as though it isn’t the dirtiest work to roll off his tongue. “Yes, it is. But I should have started out by saying that everything is going to be fine.” 

Stiles frowns. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“They caught it really early. So early it’s practically pre-cancerous. It’ll still require some treatment, but it’s not life threatening. The next few months will suck, and I might need to take a few days off work, but I’m going to be okay.”

“What kind of cancer do you even have?”

“You remember that appointment I told you I had a few weeks ago?”

Stiles nods. “The one you’d been putting off forever beca— Oh.” 

“Yeah.”

“You have ass cancer?”

John buries his face in his hands and groans. Trust Stiles to be as crude as possible. In his defense, he’s not really thinking clearly at the moment. “Could you be a little more sympathetic? And it’s _colon_ cancer, Stiles. Not the same.”

“Huh.” Stiles leans back in his chair, mimicking his father’s posture, feeling optimistic for the first time in what feels like days, but has really only been hours. “So you’re going to be okay?”

John nods. “You might have to take me to a few treatments toward the end, but yeah. I’m going to be _fine_ , Stiles.”

He lets that sink in for a second, allows himself to really believe everything will be fine, and promptly starts crying, great, big heaving sobs as his dad races to be at his side. John pulls Stiles into his chest, one hand on the back of his neck guiding Stiles to his shoulder, the other resting in the center of his back, strong and warm and _alive_ , and Stiles just lets himself go. 

“It’s okay, Stiles. Get it out.”

It feels like it takes forever, and Stiles really hates crying, but eventually he calms down enough to pull away from the warmth of his father’s embrace. The occasional tear still makes its way down his cheek, but he feels a little better. “Thanks,” he whispers. “You’re _really_ going to be okay?”

John smiles then, “Perfect, after some time. The sun will come up tomorrow and all that shit.”

“Annie was an _orphan_ , Dad. The sun might come up tomorrow, and it could be beautiful, the most amazing sunrise ever, but she’ll have no one to share it with.”

“Stiles,” his dad chokes out. “Even if something were to happen to me – which it won’t – you wouldn’t be alone. You have Melissa and the pack. You have Derek. You have a better support system now than you did when your mom passed. But you don’t need them to help you yet. You’ve still got me. I am still _here_ , Stiles, and I will do everything I can to make sure it stays that way for a good, long time.”

There’s nothing that can guarantee his father’s words will hold true – he’s a sheriff, for one, and Stiles gets him mixed up in a fair amount of his own brand of trouble from time to time – but he allows himself to believe it for now.

He can’t afford not to.

\--

The next few weeks are a blur of doctor’s appointments and PET scans and surgery and treatment scheduling. Stiles tries not to learn any more than he absolutely has to; knowledge might be his thing when it comes to the pack, but he’s learned that as a bystander, the fewer intimate details of the disease you know, the better. All he has are the doctor’s assurances that everything really will be fine and a packet of do’s and don’ts for his dad’s surgery to have the port inserted next week. A fucking _port_ , that’ll put poison in his father’s veins, make him weak and grey and maybe even bald and Stiles just… cannot deal with this.

So he doesn’t.

Stiles pretty much lives with his fingers in his ears, through every appointment, every time a new thing from the medical supply store shows up, every prescription and appointment reminder. He’s captaining the la-la float up and down the river of denial. He’s never avoided Google this hard, ever, but any sort of potential research holds the promise of images of radiation burns and death, so he hits the books instead. Derek hasn’t asked him to do any research since Stiles’ near panic attack while looking up hellhounds (aka Cana Hounds – Stiles made it as far as ‘can’ before Google’s fucking suggested searches ruined it all), and Stiles is still grateful.

So far, Derek and the Sheriff’s replacement, Deputy Robbins, are the only people who know, and John wants it to stay that way. Neither of them needs the pity of the general public and Stiles would very much like to never acknowledge that this is his new reality, so it works for the both of them. John is relegating himself to paperwork once the port is in, which makes Stiles feel better, though not any less stressed. His dad might not be getting shot up with bullets, but he’s being shot up all the same.

Because the pack will be able to smell the sickness, Derek agrees (much to his distaste – John is pack, it’s not right that he won’t let himself be treated as such) that any pack meetings that come up in the next six months will take place at the loft.

By the time the doctors wheel John in to surgery, it’s two weeks post diagnosis and they have everything planned as well as it can be.

Stiles doesn’t feel any better for it.

The procedure itself is two hours, but for Stiles it feels like an eternity before they’re rolling his very sleepy but also still very alive father into recovery. It’s an outpatient procedure, so once his dad wakes up and the doctors dope him up enough to survive the ride home, they can leave. In Stiles’ humble opinion, the doctors could have let them leave hours ago and it still wouldn’t have come fast enough. He hates hospitals, the smell of bleach and death, the beep of the heart monitor ringing in his ears not nearly as reassuring as the steady thrum of his dad’s pulse against his fingers. The staff won’t let him near the vending machines after what happened when he’d visited Lydia, so he hasn’t eaten anything, not that he could stomach it if he tried.

By the time they’re pulling up at home the sun is beginning to set and he feels weak in his bones. As Stiles watches Derek help John into the house and down into the recliner, it like he’s crammed a week into a 12 hour period and he feels about as good as his dad looks. Derek takes care of dinner – soup for John and a sandwich for Stiles (bless Derek’s limited culinary skills) – and Stiles knows that Derek will be the thing that sees the Stilinski men through this.

He passes out on the couch after Derek reassures him for the eighth time that he’s got this under control, feeling more human than he has since the diagnosis.

\--

It’s not all rainbows and unicorns from there. There’s a reason that cancer is a silent killer, one that creeps through your veins, slows you down little by little until your world just stops. And they’re just at the beginning.

Seven days post-operation marks the beginning of six weeks of treatment. The first radiation treatment is done: he’s imagining his dad lying on his side for 12 minutes while a machine beams radiation at his lower back. The doctors keep saying that the effects of both the chemo and radiation won’t really hit his dad until the last week, that the focus should be making it through that last week, and Stiles wants them to stop talking about the _last_ fucking week when they’ve barely started the _first_ fucking week. When the doctors ask his dad to take his shirt off so they can sterilize and numb the area where they’d inserted the port before poking through the skin with a needle – that, frankly, makes Stiles feel a little green just to look at – Stiles tells his dad he’ll wait in the car.

He spends the next 45 minutes mentally following along with every stop the doctors described: they’ll poke through the skin, connect a tube to the chemo pack (not unlike a hose and nozzle), which will then pump 1 mL of the drug directly into his blood stream every hour for 96 hours. Showering will be difficult. Please avoid any physical activity that could jostle the port or any of the tubes. If there is excessive pain or numbness, call the cancer center. Do not take the bag out of the casing. After the 96-hour time limit expires, the tubes will be removed. The second 96-hour round will be administered during the final four days of treatment.

It’s all so clinical. He wants to be so angry with these people, with the doctors and nurses and even the technicians for being so disconnected when that’s his dad in there. He wants so badly to be able to justify hating all of them, but this isn’t their fault. He’s just another patient. It’s no one’s fault.

That might be even worse.

How do you place blame on a disease? A disease created by the body it’s inhabiting, no less. If he’s going to hate the thing, he has to hate what created it, and he could never hate his dad.

If there’s anything he can hate, it’s that there’s nothing they can do but wait.

\--

It turns out they don’t have to wait long. 

After a quick internet search (Derek, not Stiles) he spends the next morning hitting up every store around for vitamins that will help his dad build up his immune system. He picks up a few extra things along the way – popsicles for the mouths sores the doctor told them to expect as a result of the radiation, cushions for his dad’s desk chair and the cruiser, cream for the inevitable burns, about six pairs of the softest sweatpants he can find, and extra trash bags and saran rap for shower time. He feels useful for the first time in weeks, like he’s doing something right, and he feels hopeful that today is the beginning of an uptick in this nightmare.

And then he gets home and finds bloodstained clothes in a bag by the front door and nearly has a panic attack right there.

“Dad?!” He drops his bags in the doorway, not even bothering to shut the door behind him before taking off into the house. He’s trying his absolute best to not let the endless list of god-awful possibilities run wild as he searches for his dad, but it’s hard. Mostly he keeps chanting to himself that he _will not have a panic attack_ and hopes it works. 

There’s no one on the first floor at all so he takes off towards the stairs, climbing them two at a time. He makes a sharp turn around the corner and sees Derek leaning against the frame of the bathroom door, clearly lost in thought, and Stiles tries really hard to stop down the anger he feels at the sight, he really does, but it looks like Derek’s been around for whatever happened and didn’t fucking _call_ , so.

“What the hell happened? Why didn’t you hear me calling? Where’s my dad?” Derek turns to him, clearly caught off guard. That’s when Stiles sees red. Literally. “Why is there blood on your shirt?”

Derek raises his hands. “I can explain –”

“Where my dad?” Stiles demands.

“I’m in here, Stiles. Calm down.”

Stiles rushes to the bathroom, pushing Derek aside, relaxing just a little when his dad finally comes in to view. He looks tired, pale and sweaty, dressed in his usual sweats and t-shirt, clutching a tennis shoe in one hand and a bloody rag in the other.

“What the hell?”

John sighs. “It’s not a big deal, okay. I just –”

“Not a big deal?” Stiles retorts. “There’s a plastic bag of your bloody clothes by the front door, and you’re telling me this isn’t a big deal?”

“Stiles,” John says, leaning against the counter. “It was a weird accident. The tube that connects the chemo to the tube that connects to my port disconnected. Without the chemo being pushed in, I started to bleed. Derek was dropping off lunch for me and noticed it dripping on my shoes. We went to the hospital, got cleaned up, and that’s it.”

“And no one thought to call me?”

“We just got here, Stiles,” Derek replies, coming up behind him and resting a hand on his shoulder. “Your dad wanted to clean up before telling you.”

Stiles turns to face him, shrugging him off in the process. “Were you just not going to tell me?”

“What? No, of course I was. Why would you even ask that?”

“I don’t know, Derek,” Stiles scoffs. He doesn’t know what’s happening to him, why he’s being so intentionally malicious about something so stupid, but he can’t make it _stop_. “Bringing my dad lunch at the station now? How long has that been going on? What else are you keeping from me?”

Derek has that look on his face that he gets when he “honestly can’t believe they’re having this conversation”, and right now, Stiles really can’t believe it either. “I did it because he _asked_ me to, Stiles. It was a one-time thing.”

“He should have called me, Derek. I was already out. I could have easily done it. I _should_ have. _I’m_ his family!” He knows it’s a shitty thing to say before the words even leave his mouth, because of _course_ Derek is family, has been since he came back alone from his trip with Cora, before they even got together. It’s a shitty thing to say because he knows how important family is to Derek, knows how much this second chance with the pack and Stiles and John means, how hard it’s been for Derek to not tell them what’s happening after he’s spent all this time learning to trust them. And the look on Derek’s face, like Stiles just told him he doesn’t love him anymore, has Stiles reaching out, only to grab air.

Derek shakes his head. “I know you’re only saying that because you’re upset, but I’m going to leave before we both say things we don’t mean.”

“Derek, please,” Stiles croaks out.

“Call me if you’re not coming home tonight.” He walks away, waving without even looking back as he turns the corner and goes down the stairs. The slamming of the front door makes him jump, and then he realizes that it’s not the house shaking with the force, it’s _him_. The silence stretches on for what seems like days before his dad speaks.

“You should go to him.”

Stiles buries his face in his hands, rubbing at his eyes. “Not right now.”

“Stiles –”

“We both need to cool off, dad. I can’t go home like this, it’ll just make things worse.”

His dad seems to understand, nodding at Stiles before throwing the cloth in the sink and his shoes in the trash. 

“So I guess the cat’s out of the bag, huh?”

John snorts. “Shockingly, something like the Sheriff bleeding all over the floor for no apparent reason doesn’t go unnoticed by trained police officers.”

Stiles chuckles quietly. It doesn’t feel any different, knowing that other people are in the know, and it occurs to him that it’s because they aren’t the people that matter.

“Hey dad?” John hums in response. “Can I tell the pack?”

John smiles. “Yeah, kid. You can tell them.”

He feels the majority of the weight lift from his chest.

That’s the relief he’d been waiting for.

\--

Fifteen minutes later Stiles decides he should go home and make things right with Derek, only to open the front door to see the entire pack standing there.

Stiles slumps against the frame. “How long have you all been out here?”

“Long enough to see Derek stomp out of here looking like someone kicked his puppy,” Erica replies.

Stiles cringes. “I’m about to fix that.”

She arches her eyebrow as if to say “damn right you will, or I’ll rip your balls off and feed them to you for lunch”.

He doesn’t doubt for a second that she would. After Derek had found her, Boyd, and Cora in that bank vault, moonstarved and feral, she’d been the one to grow closest to him in the following months. Derek had never really explained how their friendship had blossomed into what it is today, but Stiles thinks it has something to do with being pitied by the general public for either losing your entire family or having a video of you mid-seizure posted on line. Stiles has always been glad that Derek has had someone to confide in other than himself, though it seems that sentiment is coming back to bite him in the ass.

“You should do that,” she says. It’s probably meant to sound like a polite suggestion, but it sounds like a promise of slow dismemberment.

Stiles sighs, closing the door behind him. “Look, guys, it’s been a long day. Can we do this tomorrow?”

“What’s going on, Stiles?” Scott asks. He looks so earnest, open in a way most alphas aren’t, and Stiles wants so badly to tell them all right then and there, but he hasn’t fixed things with Derek and right now, that’s more important.

“Just – come back in the morning, okay? I have to make sure I’ve still got a boyfriend.”

He doesn’t even wait for the pack to let him through, just pushes his way toward the jeep. He climbs in, turns his key in the ignition, and pulls out of the driveway, never once looking over at what is sure to be a very confused group of puppies. There’s only one person on Stiles’ mind right now, and he has to figure out how to make things right, and he has about ten minutes to figure out how he’s going to do it.

When he walks in to the loft, all the lights are off except for the one they leave on when the other hasn’t come home yet. It’s a good sign, at least, one that lets Stiles knows he’s welcome home for now. He tosses his keys in the bowl under the light switch and shuts and locks the door behind him. He toes off his shoes, kicking them out of the way of the door; he isn’t anticipating any kind of storming out happening, but nothing ruins a perfectly timed dramatic exit like tripping over your own shoes.

Derek has always appreciated Stiles’ foresight.

He silently makes his way through the living room and up the spiral staircase into the open area of their bedroom. Once they’d made things official, Stiles made Derek put his bed upstairs after Scott had complained for the sixth time that it made the rest of the loft smell like sex when it had still been on the first floor. Derek had conceded defeat when everyone else agreed with Scott, but to be honest, Stiles still isn’t really sure how Derek got the thing up there.

Derek has always slept facing the biggest point of entry in the room, but when Stiles finally steps in to their room, Derek is facing away from him. It makes Stiles ache. In the four years they’ve been together, Derek has never turned his back on him.

Stiles bites his lip, wishes he’d had the wherewithal to do that earlier instead of saying such blatantly hurtful things, and strips down to his boxers. He crawls in behind Derek, and curls himself around Derek’s back, breathing in the scent of his body wash from the spot behind Derek’s ear. 

Despite the fact that it’s his most sensitive spot, Derek doesn’t even shudder, just continues breathing deeply as though nothing happened at all. Defeated, Stiles shifts onto his back, crossing his arms over his chest to keep away the chill now that he’s without the warmth of Derek’s skin to protect him, and breaks.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m so fucking sorry, Derek. It’s just ¬– I don’t even know what happened. It’s like I was possessed, you know? I just saw the blood and my dad and I freaked.” He buries his face in his hands, tries so hard to muffle the few relatively quiet sobs he allows to escape, inhaling deeply to try to collect himself. “You were just trying to help, you’re always trying to help, and I was such a dick. You didn’t deserve that and I’m just… I’m really sorry and I really wish you would wake up and hold me because right now I kind of feel like I’m falling apart and –”

“Stiles,” Derek grumbles, rolling on to his other side so that he’s facing Stiles. “Come here.”

He can feel his face crumbling into what he’s sure is an unattractive example of a crying baby as he scoots over and throws himself – as much as anyone can when lying down – into Derek’s bare chest. He pulls Stiles with him as he shifts onto his back, settling one warm hand just above the waistband of Stiles’ boxers and the other in Stiles hair, and lets Stiles cry until he has nothing left.

It goes on for long minutes, Derek’s soft hushing as he rubs his hand up and down Stiles’ spine the only things that keeps him together as his sobbing eventually tapers off to intermittent sniffling and wet exhalations against tear-stained skin. The hushing never really stops, alternating now with barely there kisses pressed to his sweaty forehead, and Stiles is once again in awe of the person Derek’s become.

“I didn’t mean it,” he croaks. “When I said you weren’t family.”

“Stiles –”

“No,” he says, pushing himself up so that he’s looking Derek in the eye. Stiles _needs_ him to understand, more than anything, that what he’d said in that bathroom had been the biggest lie he’d ever told. “You _are_ family, okay? You’re Scott levels of family, the No Take Backs level of family, the _forever_ kind of family. You – you have gone above and beyond, tolerating me the last few weeks, and doing stuff for dad and keeping this from the pack when I know that really sucked for you and I just threw it in your face like it meant nothing. You didn’t deserve that, and I’ll find a way to make it up to you, I promise.”

Derek sighs as he reaches out and cups Stiles’ face in his hands. “I knew you were sorry the second you said it. I know how you feel about me. You’ve been telling me for years that we’re the long-haul kind, and I’ve always believed you.” He wipes away the tears gathering at the corner of Stiles’ eyes. “I’m scared, too, Stiles. It’s been long enough that sometimes I forget he’s not actually my dad.”

Stiles kisses him, then, deep and long the way he knows Derek likes, keeps going back for more until they’re both panting and smiling. Derek looks more relaxed, if a little dazed, licking his lips as though he can chase the lingering taste of Stiles from his skin.

“What was that for?”

Stiles grins, resting his chin on Derek’s chest, right over his heart. “For loving my dad as much as I do. For being here. Everything, basically.”

Derek hums, wiggling his eyebrows. “Everything?”

That shocks a laugh out of Stiles. “Don’t push your luck. Maybe tomorrow, after we tell the pack.”

“We’re telling them?” 

“You really need to work on your inflection,” Stiles grunts, crawling over Derek until he’s on his side of the bed. “And yes. Erica gave me that look. You know, the one where she looks like she’s imagining cutting my dick off?”

Derek snorts. “That’s my girl.”

“Shut up,” Stiles chuckles. “Now come here and snuggle me. It’s been a long day and I need my beauty rest.”

He feels Derek curl up against his back, the heat from the arm thrown over his hip familiar and relaxing. Derek’s thumb caressing the skin of his lower abdomen pulls him closer and closer to sleep. He’s completely calm for the first time in what feels like years, and it makes him resent the fact that they have to do all of this over again tomorrow. 

Derek presses his face into the crook of Stiles’ neck, breathing deeply. “You’re always beautiful.”

Stiles just smiles and shifts closer. He’s asleep in seconds.

\--

Stiles and Derek show up at the Stilinski home around 10 AM to complete (although it seems to be somewhat organized) chaos. He side-eyes Derek, silently conveying to him that he needs to figure out what the hell is going on because they seem to be the only confused people in this house. Derek growls under his breath and the room is suddenly silent.

“The hell, guys?” At least they have the good grace to look just a little bit ashamed. Except Lydia. There’s no shaming her. “What is going on? Why is there a calendar tacked to the wall? Why are you all here so early? Don’t some of you have jobs? Where’s my dad? What’s that glorious _smell_?”

Isaac raises his hand, looking around the room. “Where would you like us to start?”

Stiles full on glares at Derek this time. _You did this_ , it says. _You made Isaac a sarcastic little shit and I resent it._

Derek shrugs it off, but Stiles can tell he’s holding back a smile. Jerk.

“Your dad is at work,” replies Lydia, writing something on the large calendar – is that a desk calendar? – in purple ink. “We talked to him this morning. This is a schedule for his treatments and who’s staying here and when so that he’s never alone. We all took the day off. Boyd is making food for the week so your dad eats well. Erica is keeping him company. Satisfied?”

If Stiles had any tears left, he’d probably be on the floor. Instead, he leans in to Derek’s side, the breath stolen from his lungs because while he’d expected the pack to step up, he hadn’t expected _this_.

“Stiles?” And there’s Scott, his alpha and best friend, who seems concerned for some reason. Stiles would figure it out, but he’s trying to remember how to breathe. “You okay? Do you need to sit down?”

Stiles shakes his head. “No, dude. I just – _thank you_.”

Scott grins, bright and warm, pulling him in for a tight hug. “We’re pack, bro. We take care of our own.”

The rest of the pack follows suit. He feels Derek against his back, Lydia and Allison at his sides, and Danny, Isaac, Erica, and Boyd fitting in where they can and Stiles is so overcome with fondness for this makeshift family that he can’t help it. He might have a few tears left after all.

\--

Puppy pile finished, everyone disperses and goes back to whatever it was they were doing before Derek and Stiles walked in. Derek has asked him at least five times if he’s okay and Stiles loves him, he does, wants to spend the rest of forever being hovered over by him, but right now he needs to breathe, so he heads into the kitchen.

He’s met with the sight of Boyd standing at the stove, wielding a spatula and wearing his dad’s truly horrendous apron. It’s pale blue with bright red hearts, the one Stiles’ mom had given to his dad as a joke for father’s day. His dad’s never worn it; she died the next spring and his dad didn’t know how to cook anyway, so he put it in the back of the towel closet and never gave it a second thought. Stiles is glad to see it getting put to use.

To his left he sees Erica leaning against the counter with one hip, surrounded by bottles of vitamins and, upon closer inspection, long pill cases with days of the week stamped on top. He’d forgotten about the vitamins yesterday, doesn’t even remember if he bothered to pick them up off the porch before he left. This looks normal for her, despite the oddities of a werewolf sorting vitamins when they’re practically engineered to constantly be in perfect health.

“Sorting like a pro over there. Is that another werewolf thing or is that just you being awesome?”

She smiles, though it lacks some of its usual brightness. “You might say it’s like I’ve done this before, Stiles.”

And that makes him stop cold, because sometimes he _does_ forget that, with all the grace and ferocity she possesses now, she was once prone to losing complete control of her body with little to no warning not so long ago. It’s been six years since she was turned, made stronger and unbreakable by human standards, but her muscles know this routine too well to forget it.

She seems to notice where his mind is going and punches him in the arm. He yelps in pain, reaches up to soothe the ache away – no matter how much she holds back, it still _hurts_ – and she just winks and goes back to sorting the pills into little plastic spaces.

It’s the first day in weeks where he feels like everything is going to be okay.

\--

It’s the beginning of week two and it seems like nothing and everything changes all at once.

The chemo pump had been removed a few days ago (and thank the gods for that, because the hissing sound as it injected the drug every few minutes was making both of them nervous) and both Stiles and his dad are a little less careful around each other now that it’s not there. Things are settling, getting back to normal as much as possible, and apparently his dad’s sense of humor is attempting to make a comeback as well.

They’re in the kitchen eating breakfast on Sunday, basking in the sunlight, Stiles eating cereal while his dad reads the paper, when he says it.

“You know, if I wind up losing all my hair, I’m thinking I’ll do Halloween this year.”

Stiles chokes on his cereal. “Going bald is funny to you?”

John shrugs. “It is if it means I get to book the drunks while dressed as Charlie Brown.”

“Are you seriously doing this right now?”

“Too soon?” He at least _looks_ sorry, though it doesn’t go a long way in placating Stiles. “Look, kid. You’ve got to learn to laugh about this, or we’re both gonna go crazy. Your mom taught me that.”

Stiles thinks about it for a second before nodding. He might not be in a place where any of this is slightly humorous, but this is obviously something his dad needs from him, so he’ll do his best.

John nods in acceptance and picks up the paper to continue perusing the entertainment section.

Stiles shoves another spoonful of Lucky Charms into his mouth, and that’s the end of their conversation.

\--

Stiles offers multiple times to set up camp in his old room for the remainder of John’s treatment, but after John yelled at him after Stiles fluffed the pillows on the couch for the fifth time that day, when no one had even come close to them, he decides, like the responsible adult he is, that it’s probably best to leave this part to the pack.

(What really happened after John kicked Stiles out was this: he went to Lydia, always his voice of reason, and complained that his dad wouldn’t let him help. She sighed, which seems to be her default response to any problem he approaches her with that has a simple solution, and tells him that while John does love him, Stiles is mother hen-ing him in ways that are insulting to his long-standing status as an adult. After a few moments of silence, Stiles feels he might have to concede to her point.)

He’s still, to this day, getting used to the fact that he’s not the only one who genuinely cares about his dad anymore. It’s hard for him to turn the reigns of caretaker over to someone else and just play the role of _son_ , no matter how much he trusts them, but after multiple assurances from both Derek and his dad, he does.

Isaac is the first to call the guest bedroom home. Stiles gives him the grand tour, taking him up the stairs and showing him down the hall. When Isaac doesn’t ask any questions, Stiles turns to see him leaning against the frame, checking for dirt under his nails. Isaac notices after a while that Stiles has stopped talking, and looks up, face blank.

“It’s not like I haven’t slept here before, Stiles.” 

“Oh, right.”

Isaac plans to stay for three days, shows up on Monday with a duffle bag of clothes and a book. Stiles just knows his dad is going to enjoy the quiet company.

Danny stops by the day after Isaac to set up the house with Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, and a few streaming sites of questionable legality (John learned a long time ago that it’s best for his job security if he just doesn’t ask questions when it comes to Danny) so that the Sheriff and whoever is with him at the time will never want for entertainment.

Stiles sees the way his dad’s face lights up and rolls his eyes. He really hopes that his dad won’t decide to up and quit his job in favor of parking himself on the couch with a bag of Doritos and the Xbox remote for the rest of his life. (He voices this when Allison comes over for her turn a few days later. She levels him with what is clearly a very judging gaze and tells him he has no room to talk when he does _exactly that_ on his days off. Sensing he won’t find any sympathy in her presence, he goes home.)

They’re in week three of John’s treatment when Boyd and Erica take their turn at the Stilinski homestead. They’re planning on crashing for the entire week; they bought a fixer-upper of a house six months ago (Stiles is being generous, calling it a “fixer-upper”; if he’s being honest, he thinks it should have been condemned and bulldozed with the shape it was in, but did anybody ask him? _No._ ) and their final project is their own bedroom. They have to wait for the paint to dry before they can go back.

Erica greets him at the door with Monopoly. Stiles tells her to put it back in her car. He loves her, he honestly does, but she’s one of those Monopoly players. (When Erica pulls the puppy eyes on him, Stiles tries his best not to cave. He honestly does. But then Boyd raises one eyebrow in a way that clearly conveys how stupid Boyd thinks he is, thinking he’s going to win, and he’s done. He can’t survive them double-teaming him with their judgey faces. Stiles sighs and beats his head against the doorframe a few times before showing himself out.)

Scott takes the first half of week four, not bothering with setting up the guest room, but instead showing himself into Stiles’ old room. It’s probably for the best; it’s Scott’s room as much as it is his, and if it makes Scott feel better, Stiles is all for it. If he’s being honest, having Scott with his dad makes Stiles feel better too.

The house is an unmitigated disaster when Stiles shows up that Wednesday. There are pillows and blankets all over the living room floor and empty Tupperware containers on the coffee table, but Scott and his dad are both grinning, and Stiles chokes up a little when he realizes what’s happening: Scott built his dad a pillow fort, like he used to do for Stiles after his mom passed away and Mr. McCall left, when Stiles was too restless to sleep. His dad hasn’t been sleeping well, is lucky if he gets more than four uninterrupted hours a night, but he looks more rested than he has since this all started. He grabs Scott and hugs him for a long time. Scott just hugs him back. They both know what it’s for.

Lydia is not impressed with the state of the house when she comes over a few hours later for her turn and puts Scott and Stiles to work.

Stiles doesn’t stop grinning the entire time.

\--

It’s week five that brings back some of Stiles’ stress.

He and Derek had been planning a trip to Washington, because Stiles likes the touristy things and Derek likes the weather, and had settled on this exact week to go. 

That had been _before_ John got sick.

Now Stiles is really anxious about leaving. He hasn’t been at home for all of this, at least not in the sense that he lives with his dad anymore, but if anything had gone wrong Stiles would only be a few minutes away. This? This is a few hours away, and Stiles is getting a little anxious the closer they get to _actually_ leaving. It’s his dad’s second to last week of treatment and his condition, while not awful, is still not his best and Stiles is genuinely torn.

John, when Stiles tells him he’s not sure if they’ll get to Washington, tells him to get his ass in that car with Derek and go because Melissa is staying the whole week and he feels fine. (John also tells him, in no uncertain terms, that he will kick Stiles’ ass in every way that he can in his state if he cancels on Derek. His dad may be weaker than usual, but Stiles knows what his dad can do if the situation calls for it. He’s seen it.)

Needless to say, they go.

\--

It’s amazing.

Stiles realizes, as they’re on the interstate heading in to Seattle, that he and Derek haven’t spent as much time together as they used to before the diagnosis. It doesn’t make things weird between them; he knows Derek understands why Stiles spends nearly every evening after work at his dad’s house instead of their own, and Derek even goes with him sometimes when Stiles remembers to tell him what time to be there. Stiles constantly forgets to pick up milk or move the laundry from the washer to the dryer, but Derek hasn’t complained _once_ , and if Stiles had ever had any doubts that this was a forever kind of thing, all of them would be put to rest by now.

They spend the first evening sleeping, because neither of them have done much of that lately. It’s not so much a decision they make together but one that gets made for them the second their bodies touch the sheets of their hotel bed.

They go to the usual tourist areas; Stiles makes Derek go up in the Space Needle and laughs when he realizes that Derek is kind of afraid of heights. Stiles wants to go to the aquarium, so on the second day they go to the Point Defiance Zoo and Stiles stares at the otters for a good thirty minutes before Derek has to physically peel him off the glass so they can see other animals. They see the red wolves and elephants, arctic foxes and polar bears, and the sharks (Stiles loves the sharks; Derek very much does not) and make another visitor take a picture of them a short ways from the entrance with Mount Rainier in the background. 

It rains the third day they’re there, so they hang the Do Not Disturb sign and hole up in their hotel room for the day. He’s missed being with Derek like this, pressed skin-to-skin, sweaty and sticky and panting. He can’t remember when they last had time for this, for lazy kisses, one of them curled around the other in silence, naked and relaxed on cheap sheets in a bed not their own. Stiles never knew that reconnecting was supposed to feel this good, but as he falls asleep against Derek’s shoulder, he suddenly understands why his parents took the odd weekend away without him. 

The next day they go to Pike’s Place, and Stiles is instantly in love with the chaotic, loud environment. There’s live music playing on every corner, food at every turn, and Stiles eats the best damn macaroni and cheese he’s ever had from Beecher’s and fresh peaches from the farmer’s market that are so juicy it drips down his arm with every bite. He’s delightfully sticky and exhausted by the time they head back to their room that evening, and realizes that his problems back home hadn’t crossed his mind once that day. 

They spend their last day walking aimlessly around the city, happy to thrive in the anonymity the city affords them. They watch the sun set from the waterfront. He watches the shades of orange and pink give way to the dark blue of the night sky as the sun meets the horizon, and he leans back into Derek’s chest and takes a deep breath of fresh air. He’s relaxed, settled and content in a way he’s not sure he’s ever been, and he wishes more than anything that he could bottle this up and take it back to Beacon Hills with him, back to his dad, so he can feel some measure of the peace he’s been denied since the day his wife died. He wants his dad to be able to lose himself in the sound of the waves gently lapping at the shore, to feel the cool breeze cutting through his light jacket, the subsequent shivers shooting up his spine like lightning until he feels the leftover energy buzzing under his skin like electricity. 

Stiles settles for a picture, with the sun halfway down, its rays reflecting in the glossy surface of the water, and hopes it can capture just a fraction of what he’s experiencing now.

He nearly drops his camera twice on the walk back to their hotel before Derek takes it from him, shoving it in to the pocket of his leather jacket before reaching for Stiles’ hand. To console himself, he pulls them in to the first bakery he sees, some place called Macrina’s, and buys them some pretty damn delicious cupcakes for dessert.

All in all, it was a pretty perfect day.

\--

They leave the next morning, and though Stiles is sad to go, he’s ready to get home and watch his dad see this thing through.

He smiles to himself as he leans against the passenger window of the Camaro.

It’s time to show cancer what the Stilinskis are made of.

\--

Stiles has always believed that Mondays, be they good or bad, set the tone for the rest of the week. A bad Monday equals a not so fun week. Having a good Monday means you’ll probably have at least a decent week. It’s all about keeping the karma going.

After the last few hours, he’s not sure what to expect from the next four days.

His dad is inside getting set up for his last four days of chemo, and Stiles has been sitting in the Jeep for nearly an hour by the time his dad comes through the sliding glass doors. It’s after five, and the doors to the cancer center are being locked as John climbs in to the passenger seat. It’s a comfortably warm fall afternoon: the sun is shining, his dad’s cancer treatment is days from being done, and everything up until that point had been going so smoothly that Stiles should have expected chaos to come down on them at some point.

That’s when his dad’s chemo kit starts beeping.

And beeping.

And beeping.

They’re at a stoplight, so Stiles looks over at his dad, who’s frowning down at his hip where the bag rests. “Has it ever done that?”

“You think it means anything?” he asks.

“Because I’m an expert at chemo treatment,” Stiles deadpans.

John just waves him off and fiddles around with the few buttons on the face of the pouch. After a few taps, the beeping suddenly stops. The light turns green and, breathing a sigh of relief, Stiles makes a left turn on to the main road. Being a cop, his dad apparently isn’t satisfied with ‘it just stopped beeping’ and feels the need to dig deeper. So, naturally, in the passenger seat of Stiles’ precious Jeep, his dad opens the pouch carrying actual chemotherapy drugs and manhandles it.

“Dad, what the hell are you doing?”

His dad gives him that look, like he’s asking a stupid question he already knows the answer to. “Trying to figure out what’s wrong?”

“That shit is _poisonous_ , do you really want to take the chance that it’ll burst?”

“Stiles,” his dad sighs. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m _already_ poisonous. I think I’ll take my chances.”

“Fine,” he grumbles, taking a left turn just this side of too sharp. “Don’t listen to your one and only son, that’s cool. I’m just concerned for your well-being, but, no, go right on ahead. Because playing with toxic chemicals has always ended _so well_.”

“Shut up, Stiles.”

Three blocks later, it starts beeping again, and this time, it doesn’t stop.

“We should probably go back to the center,” John suggests.

“You think?”

The beeping just gets more insistent from there. Stiles presses on the gas just a little bit harder, but he can only go so fast in a residential area. Having the Sheriff in the car with him won’t get him out of a vehicular manslaughter charge if he manages to hit someone.

“Stiles, you should probably drive faster.”

Stiles snorts. “I already feel like I’m in the middle of an episode of _24_ , so why not?” All that’s missing are the sirens, after all.

Five minutes later finds the two of them sitting outside the cancer center, building doors locked and no one to be seen.

“Hospital?” 

“Hospital.”

It takes them longer than it should to make it around the corner and through a little bit of traffic, but it’s also 6PM and everyone is trying to get home from work. If there is anything Stiles won’t miss about his dad having to do treatment (other than the treatment itself) it’s the fact that this is stressing him into an early grave.

Stiles stops in the emergency drop-off area and lets his dad out. He wants to go in, just to make sure everything is fine, that nothing is wrong with his dad, but if he leaves the Jeep he’ll get towed, and after the last 30 minutes, Stiles really doesn’t feel like walking all the way across town with his weakling of a father.

It’s a good fifteen minutes before his dad walks through the doors again, and he looks less than pleased when he finally climbs back in the passenger seat.

“So,” Stiles says. “What was it?”

John leans back in the seat and closes his eyes. “They forgot to unclamp the line.”

Stiles stares out the windshield. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“A little bit of pressure buildup and that thing just goes right off.”

“Sounds about right,” John grumbles.

Stiles turns the key in the ignition and pulls out of the way of a line of cars waiting to pick up or drop off patients. He wants to laugh, because this last hour has been eleven kinds of absurd, but he thinks it might piss his dad off. 

He’ll wait until he’s home with Derek, because when he thinks about it, it really is kind of funny.

They’re halfway to his dad’s house before either of them dares to speak.

“Ice cream?”

“Yes, please.”

Stiles really hopes that the rest of the week won’t be as chaotic as today, even if it was entertaining.

\--

It isn’t.

All things considered, it goes much smoother than Monday, even if it is because his dad feels like crap. He’s tired and achy, and Stiles has been spending more and more time with him than his dad probably wants, but his dad has taken care of him so many times when he was sick and Stiles just wants to feel like he’s still doing something useful during this whole process.

They sit around and watch movies, occasionally play poker when they need to do something other than sit and stare, and on Wednesday his dad feels well enough to go on a short walk around the neighborhood. 

Stiles thinks he’d enjoy it a lot more if they didn’t have the constant cloud of ‘what if’ looming over them the entire time. 

It’ll be a few weeks before they get a real idea of where his dad stands with the cancer, a few weeks after that before they’re sure it’s either gone or they decide that more treatment is needed. Everything is up in the air, and he wonders how in the world his dad got through any of this.

“What’s it like?”

John turns around, face a mask of confusion. “What?”

“I never got to ask Mom,” Stiles shifts nervously, shoving his hands in his pockets, looking anywhere but directly at his dad. “I didn’t know I _could_ ask. I just – what’s it like, living with the fact that something inside you is making you sick and all you can do is wait?” 

“It’s like –” John clears his throat, takes a few steps towards Stiles before continuing. “It’s like you wake up every morning knowing you have to get a fingernail pulled. There’s this feeling of… of inevitability following you around, but you accept it. You accept that inevitability because it’s going to happen, that there is no other way, and you go through that pain because the ends justify the means. It sucks,” he chuckles. “Every second of it sucks, and you know walking in to it that it’s going to suck, but,” he shrugs. “That’s just the way it is. You get up every morning and you laugh and you keep going.”

Stiles swallows around the lump in his throat. “Then why do it? If it’s that bad, why do it?”

The corners of his mouth quirk up in a faint smile when he responds. “You, kid. I did it so I could stay here with you.”

Stiles lets the words hang in the air long for the rest of their walk.

That night, he doesn’t get much sleep.

\--

Stiles has been looking for a way to send his dad off right after his final radiation treatment. His father has earned this, earned the right to celebrate the continuation of his own life, has earned it through the burns on his lower back that pain him daily, the fatigue and what he refers to as “cancer brain” when he forgets where he put his sunglasses, and Stiles wants him to have it. All week, he’s scoured every inch of the internet he can think of for ideas, suggestions, _anything_ , and none of them seem good enough, or right enough, to use.

It’s Thursday night and his dad is sleeping upstairs, and Danny, of all people, is the one who points him to the perfect plan. Danny had a family member a few years back with a rare and aggressive form of cancer, so much so that they’d had to go to a cancer center in New Mexico for treatment.

When Danny sends him the link, Stiles knows it’s the one.

He’s operating on a small amount of time – he has about 12 hours until his dad’s last appointment, and he still has to get the supplies he needs and to notify the pack that they need to be standing at the front door of the hospital at _exactly_ 2:10 that afternoon. Stiles calls his dad’s oncologist around 9 to see if he’ll be there too because, after all, he is the one who saved his dad’s life, and the doctor agrees.

Because it’s such short notice, he has to improvise when it comes to the things he needs. He can’t exactly have six lines engraved on a plaque in four hours, much less find a golden bell, so he runs to the nearest Staples and picks up a desk bell and goldenrod card stock. In a pinch, he thinks it’ll do pretty well.

Everything is set up at the front doors of Beacon Hills Hospital at 2:07, surrounded by his pack, when Melissa walks out into the warm fall sunlight with his dad. It isn’t much, just a small table with the bell and the piece of paper sitting next to it, but the look on his dad’s face is worth every penny.

“What is this?”

“This, uh,” Stiles clears his throat, nervously wiping his hands down the front of his shirt. “This is for you.”

John smiles, bringing one hand up to rest over his heart. “You shouldn’t have.”

“Shut up,” Stiles grumbles. “What I meant is that I wanted to do something… nice for you, on your last day of treatment.”

“And a bell is the first thing that came to mind?” 

Stiles laughs. “No, actually. Nothing came to mind. That’s where Danny comes in.”

“Danny?” Stiles would laugh at the disbelief in his father’s tone, but Stiles had kind of thought the same thing.

He shrugs instead. “Our best plans are usually his. _Anyway_ ,” he steps forward, trading places with Melissa so he’s now standing next to his dad and she’s surrounded by pack. “He told me about this cancer center, in New Mexico, and there’s this thing they do when a patient finishes radiation.” 

“It started in 1996, when a cancer patient named Irve Le Moyne installed a brass bell in the main campus treatment center. It’s supposed to symbolize a restoration of balance, of hope, the beginning of a new chapter. I wanted a way to show you how proud I am to call you my dad. I know this sucked for you; I’ve seen it on your face, how hard it’s been for you to walk in to this hospital every day for six weeks when all you want is for it to be over.”

“I know I talk a lot about superheroes and how much easier the first few years with the pack would have been if we’d had the resources, but the truth is, the real heroes are the people who put themselves through hell so that the people around them don’t have to suffer. True heroes are survivors. While I admit that I have a pretty inappropriate man crush on Tony Stark,” Erica snorts at that, “You’ve always been my number one superhero, and I wouldn’t trade you for all the fancy gadgets in the world.”

“So,” he lets out a wet laugh, “Here’s how it goes: You read the poem and ring the bell and we all go out to eat.”

John’s face turns serious as he takes in the sight before him. A part of Stiles thinks his dad might find this silly, and that’s okay, because if Stiles is being honest, it kind of _is_ , and John has never really been one for public displays of anything unless he was arresting somebody. Apparently, after a few heavy seconds of silence, he decides to indulge Stiles.

“Alright, kid. If it’ll make you feel better.” He reaches down, grasping the piece of paper with a shaking hand, and begins to read:

_Ring this bell_  
Three times well  
Its toll to clearly say, 

_My treatment’s done_  
This course is run  
And I am on my way! 

He sets it back down on the table to a chorus of cheers and clapping from their family, and Stiles has never, in the last six years, been more grateful for them than he is in this exact moment. Even his dad seems touched, if the way he pulls Stiles into his side and grips his shoulder is any indication. The pack closes in on the two of them, pulling the Sheriff in for handshakes and hugs, hugs that quickly turn awkward when they realize that John hasn’t let go of Stiles the entire time.

John laughs, though it sounds a little thick. “All of this, just for me?”

Stiles shoves him away, though not as hard as he would have a few months ago. “Just ring the damn bell. I’m hungry.”

He rings the bell. 

\--

_Epilogue: Six Weeks Later_

Dad: You up?  
Stiles: Yep. Kind of have to work today.  
Dad: Call me later ok?  
Stiles: Why?  
Dad: Nothing important.  
Stiles: The last time you said that, you told me you had cancer.  
Dad: As of this morning, it’s officially gone.

Stiles isn’t ashamed to admit it. He cries.

\--

Stiles takes the drive over to his dad’s that evening as an opportunity to think back on the last few months. At the end of the fifteen minute drive, all he walks away with is this:

Cancer doesn’t just change your life. It changes you, as a patient or the loved one of a patient, on such a fundamental level that it becomes difficult to remember what life was like before it touched you. You never lose that awareness of your own mortality. You never escape the ‘what ifs’ – What if it comes back? Or it doesn’t go away? What if the treatment doesn’t work? – that plague you in the night when everyone else is asleep. There is no such thing as certainty anymore.

He doesn’t think it’s hit him yet. It doesn’t matter that they knew all along that things would be fine. That sort of assurance doesn’t always mean anything, and it definitely doesn’t make things less scary.

It doesn’t change that it’s _there_.

But damn if hearing it’s gone doesn’t feel good. It’s weird being on the good side of cancer news, if such a thing truly exists. It’s hard to imagine that there’s anything positive about this disease when so many people lose themselves to it. The important thing to remember is that you can’t give up the fight before you’ve even tried, because sometimes… Sometimes, you win.

Even after you win, though, it continues.

His dad still needs to stick to his diet, take his vitamins, keep going to his doctor’s appointments for however long they want to see him, but for the first time in four months, they can all breathe. It’s nice to feel alive again.

There’s no way to accurately describe the overwhelming sense of relief he’s felt the last few hours. Euphoria might be better, but what matters, though, is that they get to be relieved. Some people don’t even get that. Stiles knows that, his dad knows that, so many other people know that. Some people never get to relax again.

Stiles knows there’s always the chance he could lose his father to something else. He’s a Sheriff in a town full of supernatural beings, anything could happen – but at least it won’t be to this. He’s lucky to keep his dad a little longer, and he plans to take every moment for granted.

Speaking of the man of the hour, Stiles gets out of the jeep just in time to see his dad open the front door. He looks good, better than Stiles had seen him in months, less tired and more like his old self. Stiles hasn’t seen that grin in a while, and he hadn’t realized how much he missed it after that moment, but that’s probably because John gets to eat real food again. After a month of waiting, Lydia finally gets to take everyone out to dinner to celebrate. Dad told him he wanted pizza, but Stiles argued that his body isn’t ready for all the cheese and grease. They’ll compromise on something.

Stiles grins to himself as he walks up the steps to pull his dad into a tight hug.

 _Cancer free_.

That has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?

**Author's Note:**

> As always, my amazing beta Meagan took this from an absolute mess and helped me make it something to be proud of.
> 
> Title is from Jason Mraz's "The Remedy"


End file.
